Field of Disclosure
This disclosure relates to the field of data collection, organization, visualization, and data querying.
Description of the Related Art
Many industrial software applications retrieve data from one or more databases and render that data in a user interface. The user interacts with the data in order to make decisions. There are many possible sources of data including, for example, time series historian, relational database and web service data. The structure of data in each of these data sources is different as are the techniques for querying each data source. Each data source requires that some information be provided by the application in order to select the data of interest to the application user. These inputs are called query parameters. Specifying different query parameter values causes the data source to return different sets of results. In typical industrial software applications, a large number of individual queries are may be required to retrieve a dataset from multiple sources of data. Alternatively, data retrieval scripts may be written to retrieve the appropriate data.